Simple Kaffa
Simple Kaffa (Chinese: 興波咖啡) is a specialty coffee roastery and café group in Taipei, Taiwan, founded by Berg Wu, who won the World Barista Championship in 2016 (Simple Kaffa — official site, accessed 2026-07-23).
It matters to this wiki for two reasons that pull in opposite directions. One is a competition result: the world barista title is the single most visible individual prize in coffee, and Simple Kaffa is the business built around Taiwan’s only win. The other is buying power: Simple Kaffa’s name appears in the buyer list for the 2024 Best of Panama record lot — the $10,013-a-kilo Elida Geisha — alongside the Japanese, Korean and Hong Kong roasters who now routinely split the world’s most expensive coffee between them.
A note on the name. Kaffa is the region in southwestern Ethiopia usually named as the birthplace of arabica coffee; the Chinese name 興波 is a phonetic play that reads roughly as “rising wave”. Neither is a technical term — both are branding.
The company
| Attribute | Detail |
|---|---|
| English name | Simple Kaffa |
| Chinese name | 興波咖啡 |
| Base | Taipei, Taiwan |
| Flagship address | No. 27, Sec. 2, Zhongxiao E. Rd., Zhongzheng District, Taipei |
| Founder | Berg Wu — 2016 World Barista Championship winner |
| Founded | 2011 (reported; see below) |
| Business | Roastery plus a group of Taipei cafés and kiosks, with retail bagged coffee |
The Taipei base, both names, and the flagship address come from the company’s own website, which also advertises a kiosk at the Nangang Exhibition Center and refers back to the World Barista Championship win a decade earlier — the company made a commemorative titanium cup for the anniversary (official site, accessed 2026-07-23).
The 2011 founding year is not stated on the pages fetched here, but is reported consistently across every independent write-up consulted, including the green-coffee platform TYPICA’s interview-based profile and Unpacking Coffee’s roaster directory (both accessed 2026-07-23).
To verify
Who the site names as founder. Every third-party source consulted says Simple Kaffa was founded and is owned by Berg Wu (Chinese name Wu Cheng-han). The company’s own homepage, however, presents a figure rendered as “Boss-Louis / 路老闆” in the founder position (simplekaffa.com, accessed 2026-07-23). That may be a second partner, a nickname, a mascot character, or an artefact of how the page was read — it was not resolved here. Separately, no source consulted states the legal ownership structure (sole proprietor, company, share split); the sources say only “the coffee project of Berg Wu”. Do not describe Wu as the 100% owner.
Berg Wu and the 2016 world title
Berg Wu won the World Barista Championship in Dublin, Ireland, in 2016 — the first and, through 2025, still the only champion from Taiwan (Wikipedia — World Barista Championship champions table, accessed 2026-07-23; corroborated by every roaster profile consulted). He was the second Asian winner, after Japan’s Hidenori Izaki in 2014.
A barista championship is not a coffee-tasting contest. Competitors have 15 minutes to serve four espressos, four milk drinks and four signature drinks to a panel of judges, and are scored on the drinks, on technical hygiene and workflow, and on the presentation itself — including how well they explain the coffee’s origin and processing. National champions qualify for the world round. Winning it is a career event: it moves a roaster from local to internationally sourced overnight, which is roughly what happened here.
The rest of Wu’s biography is consistently but thinly sourced. Roaster profiles describe an engineering background — a master’s in engineering from National Taiwan University and a stint as an electronics engineer — a coffee tricycle selling in Taipei neighbourhoods such as Jingmei and Gongguan, placings in the Taiwan Barista Championship from 2009 onward, and two earlier trips to the world stage in 2014 and 2015 before the win (Day9; Morning Wines, both accessed 2026-07-23).
To verify
When the coffee tricycle started — 2004 or 2009. Day9 says Wu launched it in 2004 while still working as an engineer; Rikkafika says 2009 (both accessed 2026-07-23). The gap is five years and the two accounts cannot both be literally right. The likeliest reconciliation is that one date marks a weekend side project and the other the point it became a regular business, but nothing consulted here says so. Neither date is confirmed by a primary record.
To verify
Which coffee he competed with. A single source — the Morning Wines pour-over wiki, a blog, accessed 2026-07-23 — states that Wu’s 2016 championship coffee was a Geisha from Finca Deborah in Panama’s Volcán region, and that the origin remains a signature Simple Kaffa offering. Finca Deborah is real and does match the description: its own site places it in Volcán, Chiriquí province, at 1,900 m and above, growing Geisha exclusively (Finca Deborah, accessed 2026-07-23). But that site does not mention Berg Wu, Simple Kaffa, or the 2016 championship anywhere, and no lot name, processing method, altitude or score for the competition coffee appears in any source consulted. WBC competitors’ coffees are documented in the event’s own technical sheets, which were not reachable here. Treat the Finca Deborah link as a single-source claim.
As a buyer
Simple Kaffa’s name appears in the buyer list for the coffee that held the world price record: the 2024 Best of Panama winning Elida Geisha Natural “Torre” from Elida Estate, the Lamastus family farm in Boquete, which sold at **200,000.
The bid was fronted by Saza Coffee of Japan, which then split the lot. The published list of co-buyers includes “Pebble Coffee for Simple Kaffa”, alongside Grand Cru Coffee of Hong Kong, OKLAO Specialty Coffee, BREW BOYY CREW, Ruber.Roastery, Paradise Coffee Roasters and Ruliweb of South Korea (Casa Solution, 2024, accessed 2026-07-23).
| Year | Auction | Lot | Price | Simple Kaffa’s role |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | Best of Panama | Elida Geisha Natural “Torre” (20 kg) | 4,542/lb) | Named in the co-buyer list, via Pebble Coffee; lot fronted by Saza Coffee |
Read that row carefully. A buying consortium — explained in full on its own note — means several roasters agree in advance to split one 20 kg bag and the bill, with one of them placing the bid. Being named does not mean Simple Kaffa paid $200,260, or any large share of it. Its actual outlay, and the size of its slice, are not published.
To verify
The 2024 purchase is single-sourced, and the “for Simple Kaffa” phrasing is unexplained. Only one write-up consulted (Casa Solution, accessed 2026-07-23) publishes the co-buyer list; LatAm Reports covered the same lot naming only Saza Coffee, and official Best of Panama buyer tables for 2024 are not browsable. The phrase “Pebble Coffee for Simple Kaffa” implies Pebble Coffee bid as agent or importer on Simple Kaffa’s behalf, but no source consulted states the relationship, and Simple Kaffa has not been found confirming the purchase itself. This mirrors the caution already recorded on the Grand Cru Coffee note about the same buyer list.
To verify
No auction wins, no published scores. Simple Kaffa does not appear as a producer, winner or finalist in any consulted results table from Best of Panama, Cup of Excellence, the Alliance for Coffee Excellence or the Coffee Quality Institute — which is expected for a roaster, not a farm — and no numeric cupping score for any Simple Kaffa coffee appears in anything consulted here. Do not attach a score to its lots.
Sourcing and roasting
What can be said with reasonable confidence is the shape of the buying: competition-grade lots, heavy on Geisha from Panama’s Volcán and Boquete districts, with additional top lots from Ethiopia, Colombia and Kenya, and a stated insistence on full traceability and documentation for each lot (Morning Wines, accessed 2026-07-23). The roasting is described as light and precision-oriented — aiming at clarity, sweetness and structure rather than the darker, roastier profile of a mass-market café (The Way to Coffee, accessed 2026-07-23).
A concrete example of the retail range: a Light Roasted Ethiopia Guji “Honey Selection” with tasting notes of floral honey, red pomelo and honey-scented black tea (Every.coffee product listing, accessed 2026-07-23). The name implies honey processing — where the sticky fruit layer is left on the bean during drying — but the listing does not say so outright, and gives no farm, altitude or washing station.
To verify
Store count, equipment and production claims — all from retail copy. Reported but not independently confirmed: seven Taipei locations each with a distinct concept, and a flagship deliberately hidden in a basement beneath a select shop (Unpacking Coffee, accessed 2026-07-23); a staff of “almost thirty” about ten years in (TYPICA — page returned HTTP 403 when fetched here, cited via the research report); an offsite Diedrich 5 kg roaster, a La Marzocco GB5 espresso machine and Mahlkönig EK43 grinders (Day9, accessed 2026-07-23); and the use of optical colour sorters and nitrogen flushing of bags for freshness (Rikkafika; Every.coffee, accessed 2026-07-23). The last pair is not two independent sources — both read as restatements of the roaster’s own marketing. Retail footprints also go stale within months; treat “several Taipei locations” as the safe version.
To verify
The “world’s 50 best coffee shops” ranking. Simple Kaffa’s own homepage says a well-known travel site ranked it first in Taiwan on a “world’s 50 best coffee shops” list (simplekaffa.com, accessed 2026-07-23), and several roaster directories repeat that it appears often on best-café rankings. The awarding publication, the year and the methodology are not named on the page, and no independent copy of the ranking was located here. This is self-reported marketing until the original list is found.
The team
Simple Kaffa is described by both TYPICA and Day9 as an unusually competition-dense staff — a house that trains baristas to compete and has produced several Taiwan Barista Championship title-holders, including the two-time champion Zoe Lai. Exact years and exact titles (barista championship versus brewers cup, which are separate competitions with different rules) are not enumerated in any source consulted, so nothing more specific is stated here.
Why it belongs in this wiki
Most of the buyers in these notes reach the top of the market through money alone. Simple Kaffa reached it through a competition result first — the world barista title in 2016 — and only then became a name on record auction bid sheets. That sequence is the East Asian specialty pattern in miniature, and it is the same one visible in Saza Coffee, Grand Cru Coffee and across the China coffee market: a dense concentration of trained palates and competition culture, a small and wealthy top end, and a willingness to pay per-gram prices for coffee that will be sold by the cup. See Premiumisation for how that end of the market works, and Klatch Coffee for what the same lot looks like when it reaches a customer.
Related
- Berg Wu · World Barista Championship · Zoe Lai · World Brewers Cup
- Best of Panama · Best of Panama results archive · Elida Estate · Wilford Lamastus · Finca Deborah
- Saza Coffee — fronted the 2024 lot Simple Kaffa shared · Grand Cru Coffee · Pebble Coffee · Klatch Coffee · Julith Coffee · JD.com
- Geisha · Honey process · Natural process · Coffee scoring · Cupping · Q Grader
- Premiumisation · China coffee market · Specialty Coffee Association
Official links
Sources
- Simple Kaffa — official site — accessed 2026-07-23
- Wikipedia — World Barista Championship (champions table) — accessed 2026-07-23
- Finca Deborah — official site — accessed 2026-07-23
- Casa Solution — $4,500 a pound for Boquete coffee? Yes, really (2024 buyer list) — accessed 2026-07-23
- LatAm Reports — Geisha: Panama’s luxury coffee sets new price record — accessed 2026-07-23 (cited via Grand Cru Coffee; not fetched here)
- TYPICA — Simple Kaffa: “An elite group that continues to create a new trend” — accessed 2026-07-23 (HTTP 403 on fetch; cited via the research report)
- Morning Wines — Simple Kaffa roaster wiki — accessed 2026-07-23
- Day9 — Simple Kaffa roaster profile — accessed 2026-07-23
- Unpacking Coffee — Simple Kaffa roaster directory entry — accessed 2026-07-23
- The Way to Coffee — Simple Kaffa — accessed 2026-07-23
- Rikkafika — Simple Kaffa — accessed 2026-07-23
- Every.coffee — Simple Kaffa roaster page — accessed 2026-07-23
- Every.coffee — Light Roasted Ethiopia Guji / Honey Selection, Simple Kaffa — accessed 2026-07-23